Lucy had wrinkled her forehead over it.

“He’s not angry,” she had said.  “You can fancy, can’t you?  Merely—­merely ...”

“Detached,” said Peter, who had more words, and always expressed what Lucy meant; and she nodded.  “Just that, you know.”  She had looked at him wistfully, hoping he wasn’t minding too horribly much.

“It’s stupid of him,” she had said, using her favourite adjective, and had added, dubiously, “Come and meet him sometime.  You can’t go on like this; it’s too silly.”

Peter had shaken his head.  “I won’t till he wants to.  I don’t want to bother him, you see.”

“He does want to,” Lucy had told him.  “Of course he does.  Only he thinks you don’t.  That’s what’s so silly.”

They had left it there for the present.  Some day Peter meant to walk into Denis’s rooms and say, “Don’t be stupid.  This can’t go on.”  But the day hadn’t come yet.  If it had been Denis who had done the shady thing and was in penury and dishonour thereby, it would have been so simple.  But that was inconceivable; such things didn’t happen to Denis; and as it was it was not simple.

Peter got out of his hot bed on to his hot floor, and made for the bathroom.  There was only one bathroom in the boarding-house, but there was no great competition for it, so Peter had his bath in peace, and sang a tune in it as was his custom, and came back to his hot room and put on his hot clothes (his less tidy clothes, because it was the day of joy), and came down to breakfast at 9:25.

Most of the other boarders had got there before him.  It was a mixed boarding-house, and contained at the moment two gentlemen besides Hilary and Peter, and five ladies besides Peggy and Rhoda.  They were on the whole a happy and even gay society, and particularly on Sundays.

Peggy, looking up from the tea-cups, gave Peter a broad smile, and Rhoda gave him a little subdued one, and Peter looked pleased to see everyone; he always did, even on Mondays.

“I’m sure your brother hasn’t a care in the world,” an envious lady boarder had once said to Peggy; “he’s always so happy-looking.”

This was the lady who was saying, as Peter entered, “And my mother’s last words were, ‘Find Elizabeth Dean’s grave.’  Elizabeth Dean was an author, you know—­oh, very well known, I believe.  She treated my mother and me none too well; didn’t stand by us when she should have—­but we won’t say anything about that now.  Anyhow, it was a costly funeral—­forty pounds and eight horses—­and my mother hadn’t an idea where she was laid.  So she said, ‘Find Elizabeth Dean’s grave,’ just like that.  And the strange thing was that in the first churchyard I walked into, in a little village down in Sussex, there was a tombstone, ’Elizabeth Dean, 65.  The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away.’  Wasn’t that queer, now?  So I went straight and....”

“The woman’s a fool,” muttered the gentleman next Peter, a cynical-faced commercial traveller.  Peter had heard the remark from him frequently before, and did not feel called upon to reply to it.